Thanks to Loic Le Meur and the rest of the SixA­part, Nokia and VNU team who orga­nized the great Les Blogs event at the French Sen­ate last Mon­day. About 300 peo­ple enjoyed pre­sen­ta­tions and debates by lead­ing pan­elists.

The con­fer­ence was all about …

Meet­ing: Although the con­fer­ence mate­r­ial was famil­iar to me, it was nev­er­the­less a great chance to talk to a num­ber of peo­ple I’d been read­ing for awhile, includ­ing pan­elists Ross May­field, Lee Bryant, Joi Ito, Doc Searls, and Hugh McLeod. Although the debates took most of the day, I also had a chance to talk with Robert Vinet, Adri­ana Cronin-Lukas, Pierre Metivier from AOL, David Teb­butt, Neville Hob­son and Jeff Clavier.

Recon­nect­ing: It was also great to recon­nect with peo­ple, includ­ing for­mer AdPep­per and cur­rent Tre­o­naut Andrew Car­ton who I met 5 years ago in Lon­don while in I was in “start-up” mode with E-Mail Vision. I also enjoyed chat­ting with Char­lie Schick from Nokia, an Amer­i­can who grew up in Brazil and now lives in Fin­land (sound familiar?).

Learn­ing: Yat Siu from Out­blaze spoke about trends in Asia, key dif­fer­ences with the West and the impact of Korea (with 100MB up/down broad­band!) … wow.

Hav­ing fun: After a chat with Andreas Schlenker from Partech, I met up with Corante’s Stowe Boyd and oth­ers at La Palette while we waited for the start of the cham­pagne party at Alcazar. The clos­ing party was great fun, with the usual sus­pects from France: rMen, Emmanuel Vivier, Galieni, Fanny, Rodrigo Sepul­veda, Julien Andre, Adrien O’Leary, Fred­eric Casagrande, Ludovic Copere, Stephane Lee, Jacques Frois­sant and Yann Mauchamp. It was also a chance to meet Mihai Cras­neanu, Christophe Labe­dan, Gaby Dar­byshire, Thomas Myg­dal from the next great con­fer­ence — Reboot 7.0 and Jerome Bouteiller from NetEconomie.

Last but not least: I greatly enjoyed talk­ing to Cate­rina Fake from Flickr. Sub­se­quent to their acqui­si­tion by Yahoo!, Flickr gra­ciously extended my paid mem­ber­ship by a year as well as gave me two annual mem­ber­ships to offer to my friends … thanks, Caterina!

With all the net­work­ing at the event and at Occam’s Razor Din­ner the fol­low­ing night, many busi­ness cards were exchanged and this and the upcom­ing Reboot con­fer­ence will do a lot to strengthen ties.

Oh … a cou­ple of more link to fol­low — my pic­tures of the event at Flikcr, all Flickr pic­tures of Les Blogs and finally, Tech­no­rati Tag les­blogs